particularly understood to mean that various members of an audience will understand the
same words differently, some let in on the ironic nature of the figure and some not.
Whereas in classical rhetoric it might be the understanding that the use of adianoeta
allows those elites “in the know” to get a better sense of the esoteric meaning of phrase or
word than the general audience, for Machiavelli, the figure is given a decidedly
republican cast. Here, being “in the know” is a category reserved for the ordinary citizen,
while the one who is excluded from knowledge is that most elite figure of all, the prince.
If we consider Machiavelli to be employing this figure, we become explicitly aware of
the critical role of the audience in terms of his discourse; Machiavelli’s language is not
aimed at some generic audience but discriminates in terms of how it will be received.
With this notion of adianoeta in mind, we can see how Machiavelli actually speaks, as it
were a double language without seeming to.
Open secrets: Mandragola and Clizia
As we have already seen, because of their more diverse perspective, the people
can “know” things that the prince cannot without necessarily hiding such knowledge
from the prince himself. Through the figure of adianoeta, a language of conspiracy can
therefore be in fact an “open secret,” a vocabulary that can be uttered in “public” (which
is to say in the pages of Machiavelli’s various texts) which the prince will read one way
and everyone else another. A quick perusal of two of Machiavelli’s principle plays, The
Mandragola and Clizia will make this point quite clearly. In these plays, Machiavelli not
only reveals this principle, but he dramatizes it via the plots of the plays themselves.
In Mandragola, at the end of the play we see a perfect example of this double
meaning, his employment of adianoeta. In the play, Machiavelli’s foil is named Ligurio,
9
Convention